Friday, June 10, 2011

Legal History at the 2011 AALS Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality

The 2011 American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality will be held June 20-22 at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. According to the brochure, the workshop "will appeal to a full range of teachers and scholars in all subject areas. It will challenge us to think about the meaning, contours and status of equality for women: in legal, social, and institutional settings – and in the specific context of legal education."  The full program is here. Many panels include, and/or will be of interest to, legal historians; a sampling appears after the jump.


A plenary panel on "Meanings and Contexts of Gender Equality" includes Reva Siegel, Yale Law School and Angela Harris, UC Davis School of Law. Jill Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School, will speak about "Recasting the Canon of Family Law," as part of a break-out panel on Gender and the Family. Works-in-progress selected for workshop panels include "The Noisy Revolution: A Reexamination of Divorce Reform, 1970-1983," by Mary Ziegler, St. Louis University Law School; "Racially Inadmissible Wives: Uncovering Immigration Law's Role in Restricting Interracial Marriages," by Rose Cuison Villazor, Hofstra University School of Law; "Historical Breaks: Race and Legal Memory Making in the Supreme Court Jurisprudence of the Death Penalty, by Melynda J. Price, University of Kentucky College of Law; and "Feminist Legal Realism? Reforming Reality from the Trenches, on the Benches and Beyond," by Mae Quinn, Washington University-St. Louis.

Both lunchtime plenary sessions have a historical bent: on Tuesday, June 21, Barbara Babcock of Stanford Law School, Herma Hill Kay of UC Berkeley School of Law, and Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts will reflect on "Women Advocates: Teachers and Scholars Across Generations," moderated by Angela Onwuachi-Willig of the University of Iowa College of Law. On Wednesday, June 22, the topic is "Race, Sexuality, and the roots of Feminist Legal Advocacy," featuring Kenneth Mack of Harvard Law School and Tomiko Brown-Nagin of the University of Virginia School of Law, and moderated by Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania Law School.